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A group of researchers wanted to uncover the mysteries behind blushing. To do it, they came up with a downright dastardly method to instantly produce embarrassment in their unwitting subjects: playing their karaoke performances back to them while scanning their brains — which is probably the most sobering way possible to come down after a night of feeling like a rockstar.
As detailed in their study, published in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B, the researchers had dozens of 16 to 20 year old volunteers — all of them young women, since only two men came forward — sing a rendition of several popular songs, including “Hello” by Adele and “Let it Go” from the movie “Frozen.” An evil selection, because all are difficult tunes to pull off — and this isn’t even the first time scientists have pulled off this kind of karaoke stunt to get a rise out of their participants.
A week later, the researchers then brought the participants back into the lab, put them in an MRI scanner to monitor brain activity, slapped temperature sensors on their cheeks, and had them watch not only their own performances, but some of the other participants’, too. Unsurprisingly, a lot of blushing ensued.
But why do we blush? It’s an age-old question that bothered scientists going back to Charles Darwin, who called it “the most human of all expressions.” The mechanisms behind it aren’t clear, nor is its evolutionary purpose — though there are several prevailing theories.
“Is it just being in the social situation where you are exposed and center of attention, and you feel the exposure, and attention from others,” study lead author Milica Nikolić, a psychologist at the University of Amsterdam, told The Guardian. “Or is it more complex and that we start thinking about how we look and appear to other people?”
Darwin favored the latter idea. The researchers’ findings, however, suggest that he might have been wrong.
First, they found that participants blushed more when they watched their own karaoke performances than when they watched others sing. The real kicker, though, is that the blushing coincided with higher activity in the cerebellum, a part of the brain associated with emotional arousal.
This suggests that “it may occur independently of higher-order socio-cognitive processes,” the researchers wrote. Or, in other words, blushing isn’t caused by worrying how we’re perceived by others.
“Blushing can come simply from being exposed,” Nikolić told The Guardian. “In that very short moment you maybe don’t think about how do I look and so on. I think it’s more automatic than the theory says.”
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